Goals

The goal of the SUN database project is to provide researchers in computer vision, human perception, cognition and neuroscience, machine learning and data mining, computer graphics and robotics, with a comprehensive collection of annotated images covering a large variety of environmental scenes, places and the objects within. To build the core of the dataset, we counted all the entries that corresponded to names of scenes, places and environments (any concrete noun which could reasonably complete the phrase I am in a place, or Let’s go to the place), using WordNet English dictionary. Once we established a vocabulary for scenes, we collected images belonging to each scene category using online image search engines by quering for each scene category term, and annotate the objects in the images manually.

Scene Recognition Benchmark

To evaluate descriptors and classifiers for scene classification:

Object Detection Benchmark

The next collections contains only the fully annotated images from SUN. Each release contains the images from previous years.

Citation

If you find this dataset useful, please cite this paper (and refer the data as SUN397, SUN2012, or SUN):

To know more about the object annotation process (and the annotator), check this technical note:

Download Latest Dataset

You can download the raw SUN database using the LabelMe toolbox. If you do not have the latest version of the toolbox (or if you do not have the function SUNinstall.m), you should download the toolbox first:

LabelMe toolbox

To download the latest version of the database enter the Matlab commands:

>> yourpathimages = 'SUNDATABASE/Images';
>> yourpathannotations = 'SUNDATABASE/Annotations';
>> SUNinstall(yourpathimages, yourpathannotations);

The variables yourpathimages and yourpathannotations should point to the local paths where you want to download the images and annotations.

The first time that you call SUNinstall it will download the full set of images and annotations. Subsequent calls to SUNinstall will only download any new images added since the last download and the full set of annotations. If the download is interrupted the next call will not download again the images already downloaded.

If you want to download only one folder, you can specify a folder name:

>> folder = 'b/beach';
>> SUNinstall(yourpathimages, yourpathannotations, folder);

As new images are annotated everyday, you will get a slightly changing version if you download the database several times. If you are looking for a frozen copy of the database, use the links in the benchmark sections above.

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under CAREER Awards No. 0546262 and No. 0747120 and Grant No. IIS-1016862, and Google Research Awards to A.O and A.T. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.